Urgent action needed to curb deadly air pollution in South Asia A new report by the World Bank states that Nine out of the world’s 10 cities with the worst air pollution are in South Asia. Ambient air pollution is a public health crisis for South Asia, not only imposing high economic costs but also causing an estimated 2 million premature deaths each year. The health impacts of air pollution range...

-Down to Earth The central government has mandated digitally capturing the attendance of all workers under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGnregs). Labourers and activist groups have opposed this and pointed out several loopholes in the move. The National Mobile Monitoring System, which came into effect on January 1, 2023, was launched with claims of bringing transparency and eliminating corruption at the ground level. Pilot tests began in May 2021 at...

-The Hindu  The directive comes even as many complaints and loopholes pointed out earlier by users of the pilot app-based project have not been plugged yet Digitally capturing the attendance of workers employed under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGREGS) has been made universal by the Centre from January 1, 2023.  The Union government, arguing for transparency and accountability in May 2021, had started a pilot project to capture attendance...

- Deccan Herald Covid-19 reverse migration of labour added to joblessness A rise in self-employment and unpaid family labour three years into the Covid-19 pandemic even as wage rates fell is an indication that rural distress has risen, the economist Santosh Mehrotra writes. Economic distress was on an upward trajectory even before the Pandemic and the sudden arrival of millions of reverse migrants in 2020 added to the stock of unemployed people...

-The Telegraph State is working to plug all loopholes in MGNREGA execution: Source Calcutta: The Mamata Banerjee government has taken up the task of verifying over 2.3 crore job cards, which make people eligible to work under the rural employment guarantee scheme, in an apparent attempt to weed out “bogus cards”, which, according to the Opposition, were issued to misappropriate central funds. The initiative, sources said, is the fallout of the strict Monitoring...